Churchill and War

WHEN it came to war, Winston Churchill was a doer and a thinker. Geoffrey Best estimates that by the end of his second premiership he had spent nearly sixty years studying wars and fifteen years fighting them. His personal experiences of war began when he was a subaltern on the North West Frontier of India, and ended when he left Downing Street in 1955, a disappointed man because he had failed in his efforts to persuade the two Super Powers to hold a summit meeting that he hoped would avert a nuclear war that might annihilate mankind. In between, he had been a war correspondent, a prisoner of war, the political head of the three armed services, Minister of Munitions, Minister of Defence and Prime Minister. It was his long personal association with war that made him unique among British politicians in the first half of the twentieth century. It also encouraged his enemies occasionally to label him as a warmonger, a charge that Best stoutly and convincingly refutes. Rather Churchill took a realist position on war, believing it to be a natural and inevitable part of international relations. But he never thought that war of itself would improve the nation's well-being. The experience of war excited, but the fact that it did so left him abashed. In his eyes war brought out the best and the worst in mankind

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